JUMPING WITH A NET

Attempting to head off a fight over who’ll provide the path to the Internet, the creators of Netscape, commercial software written for easy navigation of the Net, will officially change their company's name from Mosaic Communications Corp. to Netscape Communications Corp. The organization's founders were among the people at the University of Illinois who wrote Mosaic, a similar program distributed without charge that is used to browse the Net's World Wide Web. Conflict arose when Spyglass, a third group that wrote similar software named Spyglass Mosaic, licensed the name "Mosaic." TIME technology writer Philip Elmer-Dewitt guesses that, "Maybe this is the resolution," of the question of rights, but he also points out that in addition to the name there are two other issues. One is the browsers' similar look and style. The other revolves around whether Netscape was "written from scratch or if there was unfair borrowing" of intellectual property.Post your opinion on theNew Mediabulletin board.